Heh. Glad some of my ramblings made sense.

Low color count is good for recoloring, and any kind of color management - simply due to lower maintainance effort. But yeah, if I've tried all the colors I have and it still doesn't look right, I'd rather add a new color than try dithering or consolidating existing colors. By that simple rule, I usually end up with 20-30 colors...

There are some masters here that can do stuff with 16 perfectly selected colors, though. So I say it's a question of style, and whether you want to adhere to the limitations of old.

 I don't often say this, but your half of the conversation has made me reconsider my whole half of our conversation. After reading what you said, I went browsing through various pictures on PixelJoint to see if the color count made any changes or not. From what I saw, most of the images still had the same quality, and the color count sometimes got pretty high, or just wasn't listed. Although I feel that it's more difficult to keep a low color count, it usually only makes the image almost fade away into one shade.

Hmm, the system didn't notify me about this reply...

Okay, I'll agree it goes Line Art -> Technique -> Mastery, in much the same way as other forms of art. Line art is really the "sketch" of pixel art, Technique is the application of existing strategies, and Mastery is when you can bend the rules to suit your own style, while retaining the style of pixel art.

While I'm not against low colors per se, I find that often low colors produce muddled colorspaces, odd textures, and bad style. I do find myself reusing colors that I wouldn't think would work and being happy with the result (such as in a bird's beak and underbelly), but I still think low color counts fit into Stage 2. When people use a green because they don't have an extra color slot for gray, I see it more as laziness in selecting coherent colors, rather than a brilliant use of a minimal palette...

I agree that the color limits have their origins in hardware limitations, but if pixel art is really a style it should have (and has) evolved with the times. It's true that very high color counts often prove that a piece is not pixel art, but I would almost argue that aggressive AA and photorealism does more to exclude a piece than color count does. This Paul Robertson piece has 102 colors, lacks any AA or dithering, and clearly is still a masterwork of the retro pixel style. The debate on that piece about colors is probably why he left PJ...

Anyway, the real point I'm trying to make is that a 17-color piece with a needed extra color is better than a 16-color piece without it. So why are the restrictions so... strict?

 It's not a mouth, it's a tattoo. The mouth is hidden under his scarf.

EDIT: If it helps, he's looking straight foreward. 

Attractive manga-ish pixels. The starry mouth is a bit odd though.

 Thank you :3

I have never been able to draw a starry background. You did a good job. :)

 In my opinion, pixel art has 3 stages:

1: Line art. The ability to actually make a decent looking image.
(This weeds out the people who can't draw)

2: Technique. The ability to dither, distribute AA, constitute accurate light sources, ect.
(This weeds out the people who can draw, but are new to pixel art)

3: Color. The ability to create an image that flows and ties into itself, and to do so with as little color as possible.
(This determines those who are great at pixel art, and those who aren't. The reason for the least colors is because pixel art gets it's roots in old gaming, and they had color restrictions back then)

I think I'm somewhere between 1 and 2, with a very minor touch on 3. I'm still working on 2 mostly. In my next piece I'm going to practice doing AA.

Yeah, the foreground and background are very separate entities in this piece, which is good. The white border makes more sense to me now, too - since the character's colors would muddle with the background otherwise. But hey, it looks like a magic aura to me, so kill two birds...

I know it's not majority opinion around here, but these 4-16 color limitations are really a buzzkill to me. Definitely check out DawnBringer's palette if you haven't already - it lacks strong violets and skins but apparently you can dither some together out of the 16 it has. The forum tie-in definitely goes through a lot of the low-color-count techniques that I will probably never learn myself...

 Animes have the nice backgrounds with the paint effects. I tried to make this one dull so it kinda blended into the, you know, background. Alas, due to the color limitations, I couldn't just add dull colors to my palette. So I just tried to dither the life out of it in an attempt to make it blur.

As for the white border, it's just a bad habit of mine. I simply think it looks cooler with it. Also, most of his clothing is the same color as the background, so...

That background is fantastic, but the dithering contrasts a bit with the solid-fill foreground. Also, is the white border his magic aura? I'm definitely getting the anime style; you did a great job capturing that.

Actually, because it's anime, it might make sense that the background looks more realistic than the characters...